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And everyone is REALLY tired about this argument as critisism of the movie. There were several possible theories already about it which based on character's conversations. Even in this thread. So is it bad that they left to speculate about it? No.
It's bad for you, because you can't understand it by yourself and don't want to understand.

And I won't repeat it either: giving the audience the chance to close the gaps by themselves isn't really an issue.
Insisting on a solid situation (Madoka being the ultimate PM, then turning into a divinity) then having a gamebreaker over the course of few minutes is what I consider bad.
Can it be explained? Ayup. Will it be absolutely not contradictory? If it could completely, we wouldn't even have people mindblowed by that and arguing it is an asspull.

By the way, I would appreciate you don't use strawman argument here. Maybe you are fully satisfied by your own speculation how it went, but not everyone are, and that's certainly not "because they don't want to understand". In fact, it they didn't want to, there wouldn't be any debate.

So just a friendly note as this went haywire prior my interventions: as a mod, I must remind everyone that you are asked to "play nice". There is no need to call out people over something you flat out disagree. Anyone starting to disrupt the flow of discussion with out of the lines comments will be warned/infracted. Feel free to disagree with someone, but starting ridiculous remark? No.

And I won't repeat it either: giving the audience the chance to close the gaps by themselves isn't really an issue.
Insisting on a solid situation (Madoka being the ultimate PM, then turning into a divinity) then having a gamebreaker over the course of few minutes is what I consider bad.
Can it be explained? Ayup. Will it be absolutely not contradictory? If it could completely, we wouldn't even have people mindblowed by that and arguing it is an asspull.

Same asspull was in original series with the difference that it was clearly explained by QB. In Rebellion you have just follow dialogues with more attention and think a bit. But yes, it's much easier to keep declining and trashtalking ending, only because you don't like it and want it to be happy and bittersweet.
And even talking about "asspulles" in mahou shojou genre is not smart at all. It just shows that person hasn't ever been familiar with this genre.

Same asspull was in original series with the difference that it was clearly explained by QB

By definition, something can't be an asspull if it was foreshadowed and set up the entire series. Devil Homura doesn't have that benefit.

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But yes, it's much easier to keep declining and trashtalking ending, only because you don't like it and want it to be happy and bittersweet.
And even talking about "asspulles" in mahou shojou genre is not smart at all. It just shows that person hasn't ever been familiar with this genre.

The tone of the ending isn't the problem, nor is genre conventions. The reason people complain is that there was literally no given reason for the mechanics of how Homura accomplished what she did. Even if it was cool, and awesome, and morally justified for Homura to do all that...like, how? She just DOES IT with no lead-up.

She doesn't even have Madoka's excuse of having balls-off-the-wall potential, because canonically Homura is described in-series and by Urobuchi as "a weak magical girl".

there was literally no given reason for the mechanics of how Homura accomplished what she did.

uhh...
1)Ok, first of all you should remember Homura's original wish.
2)All magical girls turned into witches, when their soulgems were filled with despair. Madokami collects this despair from soulgems before they turn into grief seeds(it was told and shown few times in 12th episode). Homura's soulgem was filled and corrupted with different emotion - love. She did it by herself, everyone can control his emotions, it's not hard to understand. It turned Homura into abnormal witch(or not even witch) which was able to capture Madokami. So she turned her soulgem into a trap for Madokami, as she knew how Madoka's wish works.
3)Weak magical girl was always implied to Moemura only. Regular Homura is much stronger. And we don't know how powerfull Bowmura was.
3.1) Bowmura could be strong as Madoka from last timeline(she represents her in everything including bow), so turning herself into a god-devil and rewriting the universe due her original wish is not a problem.
3.2) If Bowmura doesn't have this powers, she turned herself into devil and rewrote the universe with the help of stolen part of Madokami and her memories.(paragraph 2)
Two options are possible.
4)it's not my interpretation, everything is based on original series and Rebellion movie. Using brain is not that hard. I don't care if you like this explanation or you still don't understand it or you will keep declining it, I'm not responding here anymore.

The conflicting wish idea is incidentally the only suggestion I've heard for this mess that I find even remotely plausible.

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Originally Posted by woxx

2)All magical girls turned into witches, when their soulgems were filled with despair. Madokami collects this despair from soulgems before they turn into grief seeds(it was told and shown few times in 12th episode). Homura's soulgem was filled and corrupted with different emotion - love. She did it by herself, everyone can control his emotions, it's not hard to understand. It turned Homura into abnormal witch(or not even witch) which was able to capture Madokami. So she turned her soulgem into a trap for Madokami, as she knew how Madoka's wish works.

IT WAS NEVER EVEN IMPLIED THAT THERE WERE MULTIPLE WAYS A SOUL GEM COULD BE CORRUPTED. Look, the system set up in the show was simple: Despair/use of magic powers -> Soul Gem gets corrupted. Soul Gem gets too corrupted -> Grief Seed. Using a Grief Seed on a Soul Gem -> Impurities are cleansed from said Soul Gem. Now where in that equation is there any implication that different emotions 1: have an effect at all, and 2: would do something completely different? Please point me to a line or moment from the show or movie prior to Homura's devilification, which suggests that this was even possible.

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Originally Posted by woxx

3)Weak magical girl was always implied to Moemura only. Regular Homura is much stronger. And we don't know how powerfull Bowmura was.
3.1) Bowmura could be strong as Madoka from last timeline(she represents her in everything including bow), so turning herself into a god-devil and rewriting the universe due her original wish is not a problem.
3.2) If Bowmura doesn't have this powers, she turned herself into devil and rewrote the universe with the help of stolen part of Madokami and her memories.(paragraph 2)
Two options are possible.

Now what was that Kyubey said about a Magical Girl's power again... If I remember it correctly, it was something along the lines of "A Magical Girl's power is determined by her karmic potential prior to making a wish, plus the strength of that wish." Which is to say, from the moment Homura made her wish, her potential was already set in stone. She can't just level-grind her way to level 9999 along the way. If she was capable of becoming more powerful over time, one would think that somewhere along the way she would have become strong enough to not get completely and utterly owned by Walpurgisnacht every single time it shows up. And you can't claim that "Moemura", "Regular Homura" and "Bowmura" are different entities, because they are the same incarnation of the same person.

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Originally Posted by woxx

4)it's not my interpretation, everything is based on original series and Rebellion movie. Using brain is not that hard. I don't care if you like this explanation or you still don't understand it or you will keep declining it, I'm not responding here anymore.

And I have yet to hear a single example of where the show or movie implied that the whole "corrupting a Soul Gem with love to turn into something that is neither a Magical Girl nor a witch" was even hinted at being a thing that was possible. And when last I checked, everyone here was citing the show or movie (though mainly the show, because quoting the movie to point out how the movie contradicts the series makes about as much sense as me citing DBZ dub-dialogue to counter people's claims that the DBZ-dub isn't true to the original) to point out how this whole thing does not add up.

Irrelevant. It's been granted, technically. The idea of wishes mutating in response to new criteria has never come up before in the franchise. Even if it makes sense it wasn't foreshadowed.

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2)All magical girls turned into witches, when their soulgems were filled with despair. Madokami collects this despair from soulgems before they turn into grief seeds(it was told and shown few times in 12th episode). Homura's soulgem was filled and corrupted with different emotion - love. She did it by herself, everyone can control his emotions, it's not hard to understand. It turned Homura into abnormal witch(or not even witch) which was able to capture Madokami. So she turned her soulgem into a trap for Madokami, as she knew how Madoka's wish works.

This was never foreshadowed at all, irrelevant.

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3)Weak magical girl was always implied to Moemura only. Regular Homura is much stronger. And we don't know how powerfull Bowmura was.

Homura has skills, talents, and experiences, but her MAGIC never changed; it's the exact same magical powers she had when she first contracted, which is what Urobuchi was speaking about. Homura compensates for her magical weaknesses with sheer badassery.

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3.1) Bowmura could be strong as Madoka from last timeline(she represents her in everything including bow), so turning herself into a god-devil and rewriting the universe due her original wish is not a problem.

No. Kyubey would've definitely brought it up if this was even remotely the case.

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3.2) If Bowmura doesn't have this powers, she turned herself into devil and rewrote the universe with the help of stolen part of Madokami and her memories.(paragraph 2)

Irrelevant, it was never foreshadowed that this is possible. Do you even understand what this grievance means?

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4)it's not my interpretation, everything is based on original series and Rebellion movie. Using brain is not that hard. I don't care if you like this explanation or you still don't understand it or you will keep declining it, I'm not responding here anymore.

You keep saying you're going to stop responding but you never do. You keep insulting people's intelligence simply for disagreeing with you. it's a matter of thematic conflict, not of understanding what occured on screen. Read people's posts and understand what the other person is saying.

You might as well follow up on your claim of ceasing to respond because the way you've been conducting yourself in this thread, you have nothing to contribute to the conversation.

Irrelevant. It's been granted, technically. The idea of wishes mutating in response to new criteria has never come up before in the franchise. Even if it makes sense it wasn't foreshadowed.

Oh yeah, and I was just thinking some more about this since writing my last post pointing out how "conflicting wishes" was the most plausible explanation, and come to the realization that... yeah that's inconsistent with what we know too.

Now, Kyubey initially claims that he can grant any wish, but when one looks at the stuff that happened later, it becomes quite clear that this is not the case. Like in episode 8, when Madoka is considering making a wish to turn Sayaka back to a normal human, Kyubey makes a comment along the lines of how "For you, that should be no problem at all," implying that Madoka could indeed un-Magical Girl-ify Sayaka strictly because she is Madoka and has enough karmic potential to basically do anything with her wish, and from this it makes sense to assume that nobody else would be able to make this wish. Likewise, the only reason why Madoka was even able to destroy all witches in all the multiverse was because her innate potential was virtually infinite. Nobody but her would have been able to do it.
And so, even though it could be said that Homura's wish was in direct opposition to Madoka's and so things might go a bit haywire, (then again it could also be said it wasn't; Homura wished to "redo her meeting with Madoka and become someone who could protect her". This happened. About a hundred times over. Sure Madoka still ended up dying every time, but Homura did protect her up to that point) Homura still would not have the power necessary to pull off what she just did here; By the time Madokami came around, Homura's original wish had long since become one that could not be granted, as it would require an amount of power that far outweighs Madoka's own. Which Homura did not have at the time of making her wish and would not have obtained since either because at no point was there ever anything to indicate that a MG's magic grows stronger over time. Rather they pretty much outright stated the opposite, that the more their Soul Gem is corrupted the weaker they become, and using Grief Seeds can only bring it back to its original state, not make it stronger than it started out being.

I will give you that she is harmless, from its strict definition. But past that, as I said, her role is so meaningless that erasing her wouldn't hurt the plot at all, which is actually a bad point in a story.

It would be a "bad point in a story" if she had a lot of screen-time. She didn't, not as Nagisa anyway. She had a fair bit of screen-time as "BB" but that was mainly for added mystery and cute/comedy purposes, and I felt "BB" worked well on that level.

Not every character has to have plot significance. Some can be there simply to amuse, and that's Nagisa/BB. I found her amusing (at least as BB), so I didn't have a problem with her.

1. To create hype for the movie (which seems to have worked).
2. So Mami won't be "alone" when the canon pairings assert themselves (as they did in this movie).

No, seriously, those are the true meta-reasons behind Nagisa's creation, I suspect. She didn't do much, but she's also completely harmless. It's not like she hurt the movie, in my view.

I think there's another major reason: To work her into future parts of the story.

A new character will probably be needed to fill the dwindling ranks of the "non-god" puella magi. Between the facts that Nagisa was karmically relevant to the cast in the numerous timelines of the TV series and that she was one of Madoka's two chosen guardians that is now trapped in Homura's new world, she now actually has a bit of legitimacy in playing an important part in the future fates of the other characters. It would probably feel like more of an asspull if she had just randomly shown up later.

And since she didn't really hurt the movie, I actually think they handled Nagisa pretty well. It would have actually bothered me more if suddenly she became too important too fast.

And regarding your #2 reason, have you read the "Madoka Magica: A different story" spinoff manga?

I think there's another major reason: To work her into future parts of the story.

A new character will probably be needed to fill the dwindling ranks of the "non-god" puella magi. Between the facts that Nagisa was karmically relevant to the cast in the numerous timelines of the TV series and that she was one of Madoka's two chosen guardians that is now trapped in Homura's new world, she now actually has a bit of legitimacy in playing an important part in the future fates of the other characters. It would probably feel like more of an asspull if she had just randomly shown up later.

And since she didn't really hurt the movie, I actually think they handled Nagisa pretty well. It would have actually bothered me more if suddenly she became too important too fast.

And regarding your #2 reason, have you read the "Madoka Magica: A different story" spinoff manga?

Nagisa doesn't hurt the movie, but she definitely was added just for fanservice purpose. I don't think she will play important role, if they make contination. They even renamed her witch form from Charlotte to Bebe to make new nice pairing "Mami and Bebe".

Mami Tomoe is actually a trickster god. Her real parents are Gilgamesh and Saber Alter. She has immortality and hence a lot of time on her hands. She created the Incubators and the Puella Magi system out of boredom, for personal amusement, and also in the hopes of impressing her father.

She then sought out key personality types amongst teenage girls in Mitakihara Town to fill certain roles in her elaborate play. Those girls have proven more entertaining than Mami had ever dreamed, so she's sitting back and watching them do wild things with the universe. Mami herself is also a very good actress, evidenced by multiple examples of faking her own death, and her apparent "breakdown" in Timeline 3. But eventually, Mami will pull the curtain back, and show who's really in charge.

I don't think Charlotte/Bebe/Nagisa is entirely irrelevant. It reveals a few things. The first is that even though each witch has her own proper name revealed in the runes, that the human girls can't read the runes at all and have no knowledge of the witch's proper names. Her going from witch to human girl foreshadows that Sayaka can use Oktavia. She is a red herring for Homura to pursue. She provides the reason for the best fight scene in the movie. That Mami isn't as lonely and isolated makes her stronger and more comfortable with her weaknesses. It was also likely her that got Sayaka to help stop the Homura and Mami fight, which led to Sayaka's conversation with Homura.

Just saw the movie twice in theatres, with official subtitles. Also saw the camerarip a couple of times.

The first time I was completely unspoiled. As a Homura fan, I was a bit disturbed by the ending. Now that I have seen it repeatedly, I accept that what she did was completely within her character, and had plenty of foreshadowing. Even back in EP4, she stated that she was prepared to bear any sin, and she repeated a similar line in the movie when she shot arrows with Madoka.

Her expressions as a self-proclaimed Devil were creepy, but exactly what villainous acts did she commit? The biggest one is perhaps dragging Madoka back into the human world. Misguided, perhaps, but she had reasonable grounds to believe that deep down, Madoka truly preferred this life, based on their conversation in the flower fields. It doesn't help that Madoka herself seems conflicted about whether she preferred the normal life or the Madokami life. It isn't as simple as "I decided that this life is good for you", but more like "Since you told me wholeheartedly that you prefer the human life and you couldn't bear to part ways with your love ones, I will help you achieve this." This is essentially the same as how Homura promised to protect Madoka from her "stupid self" in the past.

Sure, breaking the tea cup behind Mami and wasting Kyoko's apple were needless spiteful acts, but no real harm was done. Homura has always tried to maintain a harsh exterior. She flat out refused Madoka's desperate plea to help watch over Sayaka in EP4, then proceeded to do exactly what she said she refused to do in the next few episodes. So I think it is important to observe what she actually does instead of what she says she will do. In her new world, Sayaka and Nagisa are both alive. Sayaka explicitly says that she is happy, and I notice that her crush's hand has been healed, something that Madoka couldn't grant her. Mami meets Nagisa (who is running around happily), ensuring that she will no longer be lonely, Kyoko enjoys Sayaka's company, and Madoka is reunited with her family. If this is the world created by the self-proclaimed devil, whose worst acts seem to be wearing creepy expressions, breaking tea cups and washing away apples, I'm not really sure if Homura's intentions are devilish.

What I really have a problem with is *how* all of this is achieved. No matter how many times I watch it, I can't find any decent explanation about how Homura is able to steal Madoka's god powers by corrupting her soul gem with love. This is an asspull, and there is no better way to put it.

About Sayaka and why she didn't tell Homura everything in that conversation. I am not Sayaka's biggest fan, but I think she has good reason to withold information, despite her mission. Her message to Homura boils down to "we are all happy in this world, enjoy this as long as you can. The witch means us no harm, don't be too hard on (yourself) when you eventually find out." We all know that what Homura tried to do when she finds out the truth (suicide).

I find the scene very interesting because it is a clear call back to the alley scene in EP5(end)/6(beginning), but the roles were reversed. Sayaka is the one who knows more than Homura, and is the one who saves her life (with a fire extinguisher to boot, a clear callback to EP1 and Homura's name). Sayaka even kicked water up with her sword in the movie to recreate the water bubbles in the EP5 alley. I think Sayaka is a lot nicer to Homura this time because she (finally) found out from Madoka that Homura was tied up when Mami was killed, and she had good reasons to do what she did in the TV series.

The cake song. It felt really out of place the first time I saw it, but less so the second time. It is probably a way to emphasise that, in the ideal dream world, nightmares are "tamed" with happy songs and food, not violence and explosions. The first time I saw the transformation sequences, I was like, "you don't mean I need to watch this 5 times in a row?". But visually, they were stunning.

The ending song is superb, and it takes on a whole different meaning after I have seen the movie. This is the silver garden that I've created specifically for you.